Political Memes

(NB: This is rhetorical. I don’t believe it.)

Glad you said this because there’s literally someone else in this very comment section arguing exactly this. Sick to my stomach.

well the correct answer is actually a little bit subversive, instead of supporting trans people directly, you just subtly reinforce ideas of support for queer people broadly. And then actually do that.

the right will most likely still make shit up, but at least now it's not clear as day.

It's not rhetorical. It's literally currently being proposed as a strategy by the "Harris went too woke" crowd.

Exactly. When every national poll shows things like trans rights are more nationally popular, because they want to chase the republican vote so bad than to concede anything to their leftist base.

Well fucking said, and pretty disgusting how upvoted the post is.

Exactly. It sounds rhetorical, silly and a stupid straw man of sorts. But that's because people don't understand there were people who had to actually make such decisions.

I agree, I voted Kamala Harris and I do wish we could all bite that bullet but I understand that failure to do so is on the campaign who made a gamble that they could never lose voters in a lesser evil campaign. They were wrong. Instead of criticizing that campaign many here want to fight the same people they claim to want to protect. They are turning on immigrants, Muslims, and queer folk and throwing blame at the people they themselves believe they need to win.

I would say "funny strategy" but there is no strategy here. It's online liberals who don't understand what happened and are upset and angry. They just came out of a campaign in which they spent so much of their time justifying the lesser of two evils that they can't even acknowledge that it didn't work and it's the campaigns fault.

My hope is maybe they can stop arguing with us before the concentration camps come up.

Yep, thats one of the classic criticism of utilitarian philosophy: it doesnt take into consideration if the actions being evaluated are evil or not. From a certain point of view I'm sure killing anyone can be made to be a good trade compared to some other greater evil, but you're supposed to just line up behind defeating evil and be done with it. Utilitarianism is taught almost solely to be mocked in philosophy class, same as solopsism.

Ironically it was only the college educated who are likely tro be exposed to these ideas, and they are primarily on the utilitarian side of the argument this time.

Makes no sense. I think they just werent paying attention in philo 101. They missed out on ethics 301 as well.

Where this analogy falls apart is in the implicit assumption that this is just a one-off situation. (I mean, most people only have two parents.)

What happens when it's an iterative phenomenon? (Politics is an ongoing thing.) Then, the situation in the analogy turns into the classic "negotiating with terrorists" scenario. The received wisdom is that one should never negotiate with terrorists, because once they learn that terrorism works they'll do it again.

Maybe make it cousins. Do you choose the option whereby two cousins die, or just one. What if choosing just one now increases the danger of more dying later?

If I have a choice between bad and worse, I’m taking bad, what kind of lunatic would intentionally choose worse?

The vast majority of people would choose worse, at least in some situations.

Philosopher Bernard Williams proposed this thought experiment: suppose someone has rounded up a group of 20 innocent people, and says that he will kill all of them, unless you agree to kill one, in which case he'll let the rest go. Act Utilitarianism would suggest that it is not only morally permissible, but morally obligatory to comply, which Williams saw as absurd. As an addendum, suppose the person then orders you to round up another 20 people so he can repeat the experiment with someone else, and if you don't, he'll have his men kill 40 instead. Congratulations, your "lesser-evilist" ideology now has you working for a psychopath and recruiting more people to work for him too.

Even the trolley problem, which liberals love to trot out to justify their positions, is not nearly as clear cut as they try to pretend it is. A follow up to the trolley problem is, is it ethical to kill an innocent person in order to harvest their organs in order to give five people lifesaving transplants? The overwhelming majority of people say no.

Act Utilitarianism is something that seems intuitive at first glance, but is very difficult to actually defend under scrutiny, and there are many, many alternative moral frameworks that reject its assumptions and conclusions. Liberals don't seem to realize that this framework they treat as absolute and objective - that you would have to be a "lunatic" to reject - is actually a specific ideology, and one that's not particularly popular or robust.